Putting things in perspective

It has hard to grasp the magnitude of something with cold statistics. For example, this waterfall that I recently visited in Iceland drops 60m, but it is hard to imagine, unless you pay attention to the tiny people standing next to it.

Another example is this TED video by Ramesh Raskar, about photographing light traveling through an empty Coke bottle at a few trillion frames per second. At 3:50 the key statistic comes out: it would take a bullet fired from a gun 1 year to travel through the bottle if it was slowed down as the same rate as the light beam.

Do the same in your presentations. Tell stories with analogies to make it easier for people to understand big (or small) numbers.

Off topic: when photographing landscapes I usually resist the temptation of making that completely clean shot without any evidence of human presence in it. That small house, car, or person adds that critical sense of size to an object. When making a shot of a long-distance view, keep something close to the camera in the composition (a tree branch or something) to maintain the sense of distance.

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